Lanfen Lin

Huimin Huang, Shiao Xie1, Lanfen Lin et al.

Recently, a variety of vision transformers have been developed as their capability of modeling long-range dependency. In current transformer-based backbones for medical image segmentation, convolutional layers were replaced with pure transformers, or transformers were added to the deepest encoder to learn global context. However, there are mainly two challenges in a scale-wise perspective: (1) intra-scale problem: the existing methods lacked in extracting local-global cues in each scale, which may impact the signal propagation of small objects; (2) inter-scale problem: the existing methods failed to explore distinctive information from multiple scales, which may hinder the representation learning from objects with widely variable size, shape and location. To address these limitations, we propose a novel backbone, namely ScaleFormer, with two appealing designs: (1) A scale-wise intra-scale transformer is designed to couple the CNN-based local features with the transformer-based global cues in each scale, where the row-wise and column-wise global dependencies can be extracted by a lightweight Dual-Axis MSA. (2) A simple and effective spatial-aware inter-scale transformer is designed to interact among consensual regions in multiple scales, which can highlight the cross-scale dependency and resolve the complex scale variations. Experimental results on different benchmarks demonstrate that our Scale-Former outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ZJUGiveLab/ScaleFormer.

Hongyi Wang, Luyang Luo, Fang Wang et al.

Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification remains a challenge due to their extremely high resolution and the absence of fine-grained labels. Presently, WSI classification is usually regarded as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem when only slide-level labels are available. MIL methods involve a patch embedding module and a bag-level classification module, but they are prohibitively expensive to be trained in an end-to-end manner. Therefore, existing methods usually train them separately, or directly skip the training of the embedder. Such schemes hinder the patch embedder's access to slide-level semantic labels, resulting in inconsistency within the entire MIL pipeline. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel framework called Iteratively Coupled MIL (ICMIL), which bridges the loss back-propagation process from the bag-level classifier to the patch embedder. In ICMIL, we use category information in the bag-level classifier to guide the patch-level fine-tuning of the patch feature extractor. The refined embedder then generates better instance representations for achieving a more accurate bag-level classifier. By coupling the patch embedder and bag classifier at a low cost, our proposed framework enables information exchange between the two modules, benefiting the entire MIL classification model. We tested our framework on two datasets using three different backbones, and our experimental results demonstrate consistent performance improvements over state-of-the-art MIL methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/Dootmaan/ICMIL.

Junkun Yuan, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Zhou et al. · tencent-ai

Model pre-training is essential in human-centric perception. In this paper, we first introduce masked image modeling (MIM) as a pre-training approach for this task. Upon revisiting the MIM training strategy, we reveal that human structure priors offer significant potential. Motivated by this insight, we further incorporate an intuitive human structure prior - human parts - into pre-training. Specifically, we employ this prior to guide the mask sampling process. Image patches, corresponding to human part regions, have high priority to be masked out. This encourages the model to concentrate more on body structure information during pre-training, yielding substantial benefits across a range of human-centric perception tasks. To further capture human characteristics, we propose a structure-invariant alignment loss that enforces different masked views, guided by the human part prior, to be closely aligned for the same image. We term the entire method as HAP. HAP simply uses a plain ViT as the encoder yet establishes new state-of-the-art performance on 11 human-centric benchmarks, and on-par result on one dataset. For example, HAP achieves 78.1% mAP on MSMT17 for person re-identification, 86.54% mA on PA-100K for pedestrian attribute recognition, 78.2% AP on MS COCO for 2D pose estimation, and 56.0 PA-MPJPE on 3DPW for 3D pose and shape estimation.

Junkun Yuan, Xu Ma, Defang Chen et al. · tencent-ai

Considerable progress has been made in domain generalization (DG) which aims to learn a generalizable model from multiple well-annotated source domains to unknown target domains. However, it can be prohibitively expensive to obtain sufficient annotation for source datasets in many real scenarios. To escape from the dilemma between domain generalization and annotation costs, in this paper, we introduce a novel task named label-efficient domain generalization (LEDG) to enable model generalization with label-limited source domains. To address this challenging task, we propose a novel framework called Collaborative Exploration and Generalization (CEG) which jointly optimizes active exploration and semi-supervised generalization. Specifically, in active exploration, to explore class and domain discriminability while avoiding information divergence and redundancy, we query the labels of the samples with the highest overall ranking of class uncertainty, domain representativeness, and information diversity. In semi-supervised generalization, we design MixUp-based intra- and inter-domain knowledge augmentation to expand domain knowledge and generalize domain invariance. We unify active exploration and semi-supervised generalization in a collaborative way and promote mutual enhancement between them, boosting model generalization with limited annotation. Extensive experiments show that CEG yields superior generalization performance. In particular, CEG can even use only 5% data annotation budget to achieve competitive results compared to the previous DG methods with fully labeled data on PACS dataset.

Hao Sun, Hongyi Wang, Jiaqing Liu et al.

Multimodal sentiment analysis and depression estimation are two important research topics that aim to predict human mental states using multimodal data. Previous research has focused on developing effective fusion strategies for exchanging and integrating mind-related information from different modalities. Some MLP-based techniques have recently achieved considerable success in a variety of computer vision tasks. Inspired by this, we explore multimodal approaches with a feature-mixing perspective in this study. To this end, we introduce CubeMLP, a multimodal feature processing framework based entirely on MLP. CubeMLP consists of three independent MLP units, each of which has two affine transformations. CubeMLP accepts all relevant modality features as input and mixes them across three axes. After extracting the characteristics using CubeMLP, the mixed multimodal features are flattened for task predictions. Our experiments are conducted on sentiment analysis datasets: CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, and depression estimation dataset: AVEC2019. The results show that CubeMLP can achieve state-of-the-art performance with a much lower computing cost.

Shuyi Ouyang, Hongyi Wang, Ziwei Niu et al.

The task of multi-label image classification involves recognizing multiple objects within a single image. Considering both valuable semantic information contained in the labels and essential visual features presented in the image, tight visual-linguistic interactions play a vital role in improving classification performance. Moreover, given the potential variance in object size and appearance within a single image, attention to features of different scales can help to discover possible objects in the image. Recently, Transformer-based methods have achieved great success in multi-label image classification by leveraging the advantage of modeling long-range dependencies, but they have several limitations. Firstly, existing methods treat visual feature extraction and cross-modal fusion as separate steps, resulting in insufficient visual-linguistic alignment in the joint semantic space. Additionally, they only extract visual features and perform cross-modal fusion at a single scale, neglecting objects with different characteristics. To address these issues, we propose a Hierarchical Scale-Aware Vision-Language Transformer (HSVLT) with two appealing designs: (1)~A hierarchical multi-scale architecture that involves a Cross-Scale Aggregation module, which leverages joint multi-modal features extracted from multiple scales to recognize objects of varying sizes and appearances in images. (2)~Interactive Visual-Linguistic Attention, a novel attention mechanism module that tightly integrates cross-modal interaction, enabling the joint updating of visual, linguistic and multi-modal features. We have evaluated our method on three benchmark datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that HSVLT surpasses state-of-the-art methods with lower computational cost.

Hongyi Wang, Lanfen Lin, Hongjie Hu et al.

High resolution (HR) 3D images are widely used nowadays, such as medical images like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT). However, segmentation of these 3D images remains a challenge due to their high spatial resolution and dimensionality in contrast to currently limited GPU memory. Therefore, most existing 3D image segmentation methods use patch-based models, which have low inference efficiency and ignore global contextual information. To address these problems, we propose a super-resolution (SR) based patch-free 3D image segmentation framework that can realize HR segmentation from a global-wise low-resolution (LR) input. The framework contains two sub-tasks, of which semantic segmentation is the main task and super resolution is an auxiliary task aiding in rebuilding the high frequency information from the LR input. To furthermore balance the information loss with the LR input, we propose a High-Frequency Guidance Module (HGM), and design an efficient selective cropping algorithm to crop an HR patch from the original image as restoration guidance for it. In addition, we also propose a Task-Fusion Module (TFM) to exploit the inter connections between segmentation and SR task, realizing joint optimization of the two tasks. When predicting, only the main segmentation task is needed, while other modules can be removed for acceleration. The experimental results on two different datasets show that our framework has a four times higher inference speed compared to traditional patch-based methods, while its performance also surpasses other patch-based and patch-free models.

Jiahua Dong, Yue Zhang, Qiuli Wang et al.

Medical image segmentation is crucial in the field of medical imaging, aiding in disease diagnosis and surgical planning. Most established segmentation methods rely on supervised deep learning, in which clean and precise labels are essential for supervision and significantly impact the performance of models. However, manually delineated labels often contain noise, such as missing labels and inaccurate boundary delineation, which can hinder networks from correctly modeling target characteristics. In this paper, we propose a deep self-cleansing segmentation framework that can preserve clean labels while cleansing noisy ones in the training phase. To achieve this, we devise a gaussian mixture model-based label filtering module that distinguishes noisy labels from clean labels. Additionally, we develop a label cleansing module to generate pseudo low-noise labels for identified noisy samples. The preserved clean labels and pseudo-labels are then used jointly to supervise the network. Validated on a clinical liver tumor dataset and a public cardiac diagnosis dataset, our method can effectively suppress the interference from noisy labels and achieve prominent segmentation performance.

Jiahua Dong, Guohua Cheng, Yue Zhang et al.

Multi-organ segmentation, which identifies and separates different organs in medical images, is a fundamental task in medical image analysis. Recently, the immense success of deep learning motivated its wide adoption in multi-organ segmentation tasks. However, due to expensive labor costs and expertise, the availability of multi-organ annotations is usually limited and hence poses a challenge in obtaining sufficient training data for deep learning-based methods. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by combining off-the-shelf single-organ segmentation models to develop a multi-organ segmentation model on the target dataset, which helps get rid of the dependence on annotated data for multi-organ segmentation. To this end, we propose a novel dual-stage method that consists of a Model Adaptation stage and a Model Ensemble stage. The first stage enhances the generalization of each off-the-shelf segmentation model on the target domain, while the second stage distills and integrates knowledge from multiple adapted single-organ segmentation models. Extensive experiments on four abdomen datasets demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively leverage off-the-shelf single-organ segmentation models to obtain a tailored model for multi-organ segmentation with high accuracy.

Yinao Li, Yutaro Iwamoto, Ryousuke Nakamura et al.

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have obtained promising results in single-image SR for hyperspectral pansharpening. However, enhancing CNNs' representation ability with fewer parameters and a shorter prediction time is a challenging and critical task. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-spectral image fusion method using a combination of the previously proposed 3D CNN model VolumeNet and 2.5D texture transfer method using other modality high resolution (HR) images. Since a multi-spectral (MS) image consists of several bands and each band is a 2D image slice, MS images can be seen as 3D data. Thus, we use the previously proposed VolumeNet to fuse HR panchromatic (PAN) images and bicubic interpolated MS images. Because the proposed 3D VolumeNet can effectively improve the accuracy by expanding the receptive field of the model, and due to its lightweight structure, we can achieve better performance against the existing method without purchasing a large number of remote sensing images for training. In addition, VolumeNet can restore the high-frequency information lost in the HR MR image as much as possible, reducing the difficulty of feature extraction in the following step: 2.5D texture transfer. As one of the latest technologies, deep learning-based texture transfer has been demonstrated to effectively and efficiently improve the visual performance and quality evaluation indicators of image reconstruction. Different from the texture transfer processing of RGB image, we use HR PAN images as the reference images and perform texture transfer for each frequency band of MS images, which is named 2.5D texture transfer. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of objective accuracy assessment, method efficiency, and visual subjective evaluation.

Hongyi Wang, Xiuju Du, Jing Liu et al.

The advancement of Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) has facilitated the spatially-aware profiling of gene expressions based on histopathology images. Although ST data offers valuable insights into the micro-environment of tumors, its acquisition cost remains expensive. Therefore, directly predicting the ST expressions from digital pathology images is desired. Current methods usually adopt existing regression backbones along with patch-sampling for this task, which ignores the inherent multi-scale information embedded in the pyramidal data structure of digital pathology images, and wastes the inter-spot visual information crucial for accurate gene expression prediction. To address these limitations, we propose M2OST, a many-to-one regression Transformer that can accommodate the hierarchical structure of the pathology images via a decoupled multi-scale feature extractor. Unlike traditional models that are trained with one-to-one image-label pairs, M2OST uses multiple images from different levels of the digital pathology image to jointly predict the gene expressions in their common corresponding spot. Built upon our many-to-one scheme, M2OST can be easily scaled to fit different numbers of inputs, and its network structure inherently incorporates nearby inter-spot features, enhancing regression performance. We have tested M2OST on three public ST datasets and the experimental results show that M2OST can achieve state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters and floating-point operations (FLOPs).

Ziwei Niu, Hao Sun, Shujun Bian et al.

Accurate interpretation of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is crucial for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases. Recent multimodal approaches that integrate ECGs with accompanying clinical reports show strong potential, but they still face two main concerns from a modality perspective: (1) intra-modality: existing models process ECGs in a lead-agnostic manner, overlooking spatial-temporal dependencies across leads, which restricts their effectiveness in modeling fine-grained diagnostic patterns; (2) inter-modality: existing methods directly align ECG signals with clinical reports, introducing modality-specific biases due to the free-text nature of the reports. In light of these two issues, we propose CG-DMER, a contrastive-generative framework for disentangled multimodal ECG representation learning, powered by two key designs: (1) Spatial-temporal masked modeling is designed to better capture fine-grained temporal dynamics and inter-lead spatial dependencies by applying masking across both spatial and temporal dimensions and reconstructing the missing information. (2) A representation disentanglement and alignment strategy is designed to mitigate unnecessary noise and modality-specific biases by introducing modality-specific and modality-shared encoders, ensuring a clearer separation between modality-invariant and modality-specific representations. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that CG-DMER achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse downstream tasks.

Shiyu Teng, Jiaqing Liu, Hao Sun et al.

Depression remains widely underdiagnosed and undertreated because stigma and subjective symptom ratings hinder reliable screening. To address this challenge, we propose a coarse-to-fine, multi-stage framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for accurate and interpretable detection. The pipeline performs binary screening, five-class severity classification, and continuous regression. At each stage, an LLM produces progressively richer clinical summaries that guide a multimodal fusion module integrating text, audio, and video features, yielding predictions with transparent rationale. The system then consolidates all summaries into a concise, human-readable assessment report. Experiments on the E-DAIC and CMDC datasets show significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and interpretability.

Shuyi Ouyang, Jinyang Zhang, Xiangye Lin et al.

In clinical practice, segmenting specific lesions based on the needs of physicians can significantly enhance diagnostic accuracy and treatment efficiency. However, conventional lesion segmentation models lack the flexibility to distinguish lesions according to specific requirements. Given the practical advantages of using text as guidance, we propose a novel model, Language-guided Scale-aware MedSegmentor (LSMS), which segments target lesions in medical images based on given textual expressions. We define this as a new task termed Referring Lesion Segmentation (RLS). To address the lack of suitable benchmarks for RLS, we construct a vision-language medical dataset named Reference Hepatic Lesion Segmentation (RefHL-Seg). LSMS incorporates two key designs: (i) Scale-Aware Vision-Language attention module, which performs visual feature extraction and vision-language alignment in parallel. By leveraging diverse convolutional kernels, this module acquires rich visual representations and interacts closely with linguistic features, thereby enhancing the model's capacity for precise object localization. (ii) Full-Scale Decoder, which globally models multi-modal features across multiple scales and captures complementary information between them to accurately delineate lesion boundaries. Additionally, we design a specialized loss function comprising both segmentation loss and vision-language contrastive loss to better optimize cross-modal learning. We validate the performance of LSMS on RLS as well as on conventional lesion segmentation tasks across multiple datasets. Our LSMS consistently achieves superior performance with significantly lower computational cost. Code and datasets will be released.

Hao Sun, Yu Song, Jiaqing Liu et al.

Large-scale models have exhibited remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, including automated medical services and intelligent customer support. However, as most large models are trained on single-modality corpora, enabling them to effectively process and understand multimodal signals remains a significant challenge. Current research often focuses on designing task-specific or scenario-specific tuning strategies, which limits the scalability and versatility. To address this limitation, we propose a unified framework that concurrently handles multiple tasks and modalities. In this framework, all modalities and tasks are represented as unified tokens and trained using a single, consistent approach. To enable efficient multitask processing, we introduce a novel tuning strategy termed neural tuning, inspired by the concept of sparse distributed representation in the human brain, where only specific subsets of neurons are activated for each task. Furthermore, to advance research in multimodal and multitask learning, we present a new benchmark, MMUD, which includes samples annotated with multiple task labels spanning reasoning segmentation, referring segmentation, image captioning, and text-to-image generation. By applying neural tuning to pretrained large models on the MMUD benchmark, we demonstrate the ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously in a streamlined and efficient manner. All models, code, and datasets will be released publicly upon publication, fostering further research and innovation in this field.

Ziwei Niu, Shuyi Ouyang, Shiao Xie et al.

Medical Image Analysis (MedIA) has emerged as a crucial tool in computer-aided diagnosis systems, particularly with the advancement of deep learning (DL) in recent years. However, well-trained deep models often experience significant performance degradation when deployed in different medical sites, modalities, and sequences, known as a domain shift issue. In light of this, Domain Generalization (DG) for MedIA aims to address the domain shift challenge by generalizing effectively and performing robustly across unknown data distributions. This paper presents the a comprehensive review of substantial developments in this area. First, we provide a formal definition of domain shift and domain generalization in medical field, and discuss several related settings. Subsequently, we summarize the recent methods from three viewpoints: data manipulation level, feature representation level, and model training level, and present some algorithms in detail for each viewpoints. Furthermore, we introduce the commonly used datasets. Finally, we summarize existing literature and present some potential research topics for the future. For this survey, we also created a GitHub project by collecting the supporting resources, at the link: https://github.com/Ziwei-Niu/DG_for_MedIA

Zhicheng He, Yunpeng Zhao, Junde Wu et al.

Medical image generation is pivotal in applications like data augmentation for low-resource clinical tasks and privacy-preserving data sharing. However, developing a scalable generative backbone for medical imaging requires architectural efficiency, sufficient multi-organ data, and principled evaluation, yet current approaches leave these aspects unresolved. Therefore, we introduce MedVAR, the first autoregressive-based foundation model that adopts the next-scale prediction paradigm to enable fast and scale-up-friendly medical image synthesis. MedVAR generates images in a coarse-to-fine manner and produces structured multi-scale representations suitable for downstream use. To support hierarchical generation, we curate a harmonized dataset of around 440,000 CT and MRI images spanning six anatomical regions. Comprehensive experiments across fidelity, diversity, and scalability show that MedVAR achieves state-of-the-art generative performance and offers a promising architectural direction for future medical generative foundation models.

Shurong Chai, Rahul Kumar JAIN, Rui Xu et al.

Deep learning relies heavily on data augmentation to mitigate limited data, especially in medical imaging. Recent multimodal learning integrates text and images for segmentation, known as referring or text-guided image segmentation. However, common augmentations like rotation and flipping disrupt spatial alignment between image and text, weakening performance. To address this, we propose an early fusion framework that combines text and visual features before augmentation, preserving spatial consistency. We also design a lightweight generator that projects text embeddings into visual space, bridging semantic gaps. Visualization of generated pseudo-images shows accurate region localization. Our method is evaluated on three medical imaging tasks and four segmentation frameworks, achieving state-of-the-art results. Code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/11yxk/MedSeg_EarlyFusion.

Xiaoyu Shi, Rahul Kumar Jain, Yinhao Li et al.

Deep learning has demonstrated remarkable success in medical image segmentation and computer-aided diagnosis. In particular, numerous advanced methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in brain tumor segmentation from MRI scans. While recent studies in other medical imaging domains have revealed that integrating textual reports with visual data can enhance segmentation accuracy, the field of brain tumor analysis lacks a comprehensive dataset that combines radiological images with corresponding textual annotations. This limitation has hindered the exploration of multimodal approaches that leverage both imaging and textual data. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce the TextBraTS dataset, the first publicly available volume-level multimodal dataset that contains paired MRI volumes and rich textual annotations, derived from the widely adopted BraTS2020 benchmark. Building upon this novel dataset, we propose a novel baseline framework and sequential cross-attention method for text-guided volumetric medical image segmentation. Through extensive experiments with various text-image fusion strategies and templated text formulations, our approach demonstrates significant improvements in brain tumor segmentation accuracy, offering valuable insights into effective multimodal integration techniques. Our dataset, implementation code, and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Jupitern52/TextBraTS.

Hongyi Wang, Xiuju Du, Jing Liu et al.

The advancement of Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) has facilitated the spatially-aware profiling of gene expressions based on histopathology images. Although ST data offers valuable insights into the micro-environment of tumors, its acquisition cost remains expensive. Therefore, directly predicting the ST expressions from digital pathology images is desired. Current methods usually adopt existing regression backbones for this task, which ignore the inherent multi-scale hierarchical data structure of digital pathology images. To address this limit, we propose M2ORT, a many-to-one regression Transformer that can accommodate the hierarchical structure of the pathology images through a decoupled multi-scale feature extractor. Different from traditional models that are trained with one-to-one image-label pairs, M2ORT accepts multiple pathology images of different magnifications at a time to jointly predict the gene expressions at their corresponding common ST spot, aiming at learning a many-to-one relationship through training. We have tested M2ORT on three public ST datasets and the experimental results show that M2ORT can achieve state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters and floating-point operations (FLOPs). The code is available at: https://github.com/Dootmaan/M2ORT/.

Hongyi Wang, Shiao Xie, Lanfen Lin et al.

Though U-Net has achieved tremendous success in medical image segmentation tasks, it lacks the ability to explicitly model long-range dependencies. Therefore, Vision Transformers have emerged as alternative segmentation structures recently, for their innate ability of capturing long-range correlations through Self-Attention (SA). However, Transformers usually rely on large-scale pre-training and have high computational complexity. Furthermore, SA can only model self-affinities within a single sample, ignoring the potential correlations of the overall dataset. To address these problems, we propose a novel Transformer module named Mixed Transformer Module (MTM) for simultaneous inter- and intra- affinities learning. MTM first calculates self-affinities efficiently through our well-designed Local-Global Gaussian-Weighted Self-Attention (LGG-SA). Then, it mines inter-connections between data samples through External Attention (EA). By using MTM, we construct a U-shaped model named Mixed Transformer U-Net (MT-UNet) for accurate medical image segmentation. We test our method on two different public datasets, and the experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better performance over other state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/Dootmaan/MT-UNet.

Huimin Huang, Lanfen Lin, Ruofeng Tong et al.

Recently, a growing interest has been seen in deep learning-based semantic segmentation. UNet, which is one of deep learning networks with an encoder-decoder architecture, is widely used in medical image segmentation. Combining multi-scale features is one of important factors for accurate segmentation. UNet++ was developed as a modified Unet by designing an architecture with nested and dense skip connections. However, it does not explore sufficient information from full scales and there is still a large room for improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel UNet 3+, which takes advantage of full-scale skip connections and deep supervisions. The full-scale skip connections incorporate low-level details with high-level semantics from feature maps in different scales; while the deep supervision learns hierarchical representations from the full-scale aggregated feature maps. The proposed method is especially benefiting for organs that appear at varying scales. In addition to accuracy improvements, the proposed UNet 3+ can reduce the network parameters to improve the computation efficiency. We further propose a hybrid loss function and devise a classification-guided module to enhance the organ boundary and reduce the over-segmentation in a non-organ image, yielding more accurate segmentation results. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on two datasets. The code is available at: github.com/ZJUGiveLab/UNet-Version

Shiyu Teng, Jiaqing Liu, Rahul Kumar Jain et al.

Depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, posing a severe burden on individuals, healthcare systems, and society at large. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in addressing mental health challenges, including the detection of depression through text-based analysis. However, current LLM-based methods often struggle with nuanced symptom identification and lack a transparent, step-by-step reasoning process, making it difficult to accurately classify and explain mental health conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a Chain-of-Thought Prompting approach that enhances both the performance and interpretability of LLM-based depression detection. Our method breaks down the detection process into four stages: (1) sentiment analysis, (2) binary depression classification, (3) identification of underlying causes, and (4) assessment of severity. By guiding the model through these structured reasoning steps, we improve interpretability and reduce the risk of overlooking subtle clinical indicators. We validate our method on the E-DAIC dataset, where we test multiple state-of-the-art large language models. Experimental results indicate that our Chain-of-Thought Prompting technique yields superior performance in both classification accuracy and the granularity of diagnostic insights, compared to baseline approaches.

Ruibo Hou, Shiyu Teng, Jiaqing Liu et al.

Multimodal deep learning has shown promise in depression detection by integrating text, audio, and video signals. Recent work leverages sentiment analysis to enhance emotional understanding, yet suffers from high computational cost, domain mismatch, and static knowledge limitations. To address these issues, we propose a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework. Given a depression-related text, our method retrieves semantically relevant emotional content from a sentiment dataset and uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate an Emotion Prompt as an auxiliary modality. This prompt enriches emotional representation and improves interpretability. Experiments on the AVEC 2019 dataset show our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with CCC of 0.593 and MAE of 3.95, surpassing previous transfer learning and multi-task learning baselines.

Hongyi Wang, Zhengjie Zhu, Jiabo Ma et al.

The rapid digitization of histopathology slides has opened up new possibilities for computational tools in clinical and research workflows. Among these, content-based slide retrieval stands out, enabling pathologists to identify morphologically and semantically similar cases, thereby supporting precise diagnoses, enhancing consistency across observers, and assisting example-based education. However, effective retrieval of whole slide images (WSIs) remains challenging due to their gigapixel scale and the difficulty of capturing subtle semantic differences amid abundant irrelevant content. To overcome these challenges, we present PathSearch, a retrieval framework that unifies fine-grained attentive mosaic representations with global-wise slide embeddings aligned through vision-language contrastive learning. Trained on a corpus of 6,926 slide-report pairs, PathSearch captures both fine-grained morphological cues and high-level semantic patterns to enable accurate and flexible retrieval. The framework supports two key functionalities: (1) mosaic-based image-to-image retrieval, ensuring accurate and efficient slide research; and (2) multi-modal retrieval, where text queries can directly retrieve relevant slides. PathSearch was rigorously evaluated on four public pathology datasets and three in-house cohorts, covering tasks including anatomical site retrieval, tumor subtyping, tumor vs. non-tumor discrimination, and grading across diverse organs such as breast, lung, kidney, liver, and stomach. External results show that PathSearch outperforms traditional image-to-image retrieval frameworks. A multi-center reader study further demonstrates that PathSearch improves diagnostic accuracy, boosts confidence, and enhances inter-observer agreement among pathologists in real clinical scenarios. These results establish PathSearch as a scalable and generalizable retrieval solution for digital pathology.

Xinyao Yu, Hao Sun, Zeyu Ling et al.

In recent years, large-scale pre-trained multimodal models (LMMs) generally emerge to integrate the vision and language modalities, achieving considerable success in multimodal tasks, such as text-image classification. The growing size of LMMs, however, results in a significant computational cost for fine-tuning these models for downstream tasks. Hence, prompt-based interaction strategy is studied to align modalities more efficiently. In this context, we propose a novel efficient prompt-based multimodal interaction strategy, namely Efficient Prompt Interaction for text-image Classification (EPIC). Specifically, we utilize temporal prompts on intermediate layers, and integrate different modalities with similarity-based prompt interaction, to leverage sufficient information exchange between modalities. Utilizing this approach, our method achieves reduced computational resource consumption and fewer trainable parameters (about 1\% of the foundation model) compared to other fine-tuning strategies. Furthermore, it demonstrates superior performance on the UPMC-Food101 and SNLI-VE datasets, while achieving comparable performance on the MM-IMDB dataset.

Shiao Xie, Hongyi Wang, Ziwei Niu et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) for medical image segmentation is a challenging yet highly practical task, which reduces reliance on large-scale labeled dataset by leveraging unlabeled samples. Among SSL techniques, the weak-to-strong consistency framework, popularized by FixMatch, has emerged as a state-of-the-art method in classification tasks. Notably, such a simple pipeline has also shown competitive performance in medical image segmentation. However, two key limitations still persist, impeding its efficient adaptation: (1) the neglect of contextual dependencies results in inconsistent predictions for similar semantic features, leading to incomplete object segmentation; (2) the lack of exploitation of semantic similarity between labeled and unlabeled data induces considerable class-distribution discrepancy. To address these limitations, we propose a novel semi-supervised framework based on FixMatch, named SemSim, powered by two appealing designs from semantic similarity perspective: (1) rectifying pixel-wise prediction by reasoning about the intra-image pair-wise affinity map, thus integrating contextual dependencies explicitly into the final prediction; (2) bridging labeled and unlabeled data via a feature querying mechanism for compact class representation learning, which fully considers cross-image anatomical similarities. As the reliable semantic similarity extraction depends on robust features, we further introduce an effective spatial-aware fusion module (SFM) to explore distinctive information from multiple scales. Extensive experiments show that SemSim yields consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art methods across three public segmentation benchmarks.

Xinyao Yu, Hao Sun, Ziwei Niu et al.

In recent years, large-scale pre-trained multimodal models (LMM) generally emerge to integrate the vision and language modalities, achieving considerable success in various natural language processing and computer vision tasks. The growing size of LMMs, however, results in a significant computational cost for fine-tuning these models for downstream tasks. Hence, prompt-based interaction strategy is studied to align modalities more efficiently. In this contex, we propose a novel prompt-based multimodal interaction strategy inspired by human memory strategy, namely Memory-Inspired Temporal Prompt Interaction (MITP). Our proposed method involves in two stages as in human memory strategy: the acquiring stage, and the consolidation and activation stage. We utilize temporal prompts on intermediate layers to imitate the acquiring stage, leverage similarity-based prompt interaction to imitate memory consolidation, and employ prompt generation strategy to imitate memory activation. The main strength of our paper is that we interact the prompt vectors on intermediate layers to leverage sufficient information exchange between modalities, with compressed trainable parameters and memory usage. We achieve competitive results on several datasets with relatively small memory usage and 2.0M of trainable parameters (about 1% of the pre-trained foundation model).

Xu Ma, Junkun Yuan, Yen-wei Chen et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to learn transferable knowledge from a labeled source domain and adapts a trained model to an unlabeled target domain. To bridge the gap between source and target domains, one prevailing strategy is to minimize the distribution discrepancy by aligning their semantic features extracted by deep models. The existing alignment-based methods mainly focus on reducing domain divergence in the same model layer. However, the same level of semantic information could distribute across model layers due to the domain shifts. To further boost model adaptation performance, we propose a novel method called Attention-based Cross-layer Domain Alignment (ACDA), which captures the semantic relationship between the source and target domains across model layers and calibrates each level of semantic information automatically through a dynamic attention mechanism. An elaborate attention mechanism is designed to reweight each cross-layer pair based on their semantic similarity for precise domain alignment, effectively matching each level of semantic information during model adaptation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets consistently show that the proposed method ACDA yields state-of-the-art performance.

Junkun Yuan, Xu Ma, Defang Chen et al.

Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn from multiple known source domains a model that can generalize well to unknown target domains. The existing DG methods usually exploit the fusion of shared multi-source data to train a generalizable model. However, tremendous data is distributed across lots of places nowadays that can not be shared due to privacy policies. In this paper, we tackle the problem of federated domain generalization where the source datasets can only be accessed and learned locally for privacy protection. We propose a novel framework called Collaborative Semantic Aggregation and Calibration (CSAC) to enable this challenging problem. To fully absorb multi-source semantic information while avoiding unsafe data fusion, we conduct data-free semantic aggregation by fusing the models trained on the separated domains layer-by-layer. To address the semantic dislocation problem caused by domain shift, we further design cross-layer semantic calibration with an attention mechanism to align each semantic level and enhance domain invariance. We unify multi-source semantic learning and alignment in a collaborative way by repeating the semantic aggregation and calibration alternately, keeping each dataset localized, and the data privacy is carefully protected. Extensive experiments show the significant performance of our method in addressing this challenging problem.

Junkun Yuan, Xu Ma, Ruoxuan Xiong et al.

Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn from multiple source domains a model that can generalize well on unseen target domains. Existing DG methods mainly learn the representations with invariant marginal distribution of the input features, however, the invariance of the conditional distribution of the labels given the input features is more essential for unknown domain prediction. Meanwhile, the existing of unobserved confounders which affect the input features and labels simultaneously cause spurious correlation and hinder the learning of the invariant relationship contained in the conditional distribution. Interestingly, with a causal view on the data generating process, we find that the input features of one domain are valid instrumental variables for other domains. Inspired by this finding, we propose an instrumental variable-driven DG method (IV-DG) by removing the bias of the unobserved confounders with two-stage learning. In the first stage, it learns the conditional distribution of the input features of one domain given input features of another domain. In the second stage, it estimates the relationship by predicting labels with the learned conditional distribution. Theoretical analyses and simulation experiments show that it accurately captures the invariant relationship. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that IV-DG method yields state-of-the-art results.

Junkun Yuan, Xu Ma, Defang Chen et al.

Conventional Domain Generalization (CDG) utilizes multiple labeled source datasets to train a generalizable model for unseen target domains. However, due to expensive annotation costs, the requirements of labeling all the source data are hard to be met in real-world applications. In this paper, we investigate a Single Labeled Domain Generalization (SLDG) task with only one source domain being labeled, which is more practical and challenging than the CDG task. A major obstacle in the SLDG task is the discriminability-generalization bias: the discriminative information in the labeled source dataset may contain domain-specific bias, constraining the generalization of the trained model. To tackle this challenging task, we propose a novel framework called Domain-Specific Bias Filtering (DSBF), which initializes a discriminative model with the labeled source data and then filters out its domain-specific bias with the unlabeled source data for generalization improvement. We divide the filtering process into (1) feature extractor debiasing via k-means clustering-based semantic feature re-extraction and (2) classifier rectification through attention-guided semantic feature projection. DSBF unifies the exploration of the labeled and the unlabeled source data to enhance the discriminability and generalization of the trained model, resulting in a highly generalizable model. We further provide theoretical analysis to verify the proposed domain-specific bias filtering process. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show the superior performance of DSBF in tackling both the challenging SLDG task and the CDG task.

Yue Zhang, Chengtao Peng, Liying Peng et al.

Multi-phase computed tomography (CT) images provide crucial complementary information for accurate liver tumor segmentation (LiTS). State-of-the-art multi-phase LiTS methods usually fused cross-phase features through phase-weighted summation or channel-attention based concatenation. However, these methods ignored the spatial (pixel-wise) relationships between different phases, hence leading to insufficient feature integration. In addition, the performance of existing methods remains subject to the uncertainty in segmentation, which is particularly acute in tumor boundary regions. In this work, we propose a novel LiTS method to adequately aggregate multi-phase information and refine uncertain region segmentation. To this end, we introduce a spatial aggregation module (SAM), which encourages per-pixel interactions between different phases, to make full use of cross-phase information. Moreover, we devise an uncertain region inpainting module (URIM) to refine uncertain pixels using neighboring discriminative features. Experiments on an in-house multi-phase CT dataset of focal liver lesions (MPCT-FLLs) demonstrate that our method achieves promising liver tumor segmentation and outperforms state-of-the-arts.

Junkun Yuan, Anpeng Wu, Kun Kuang et al.

Instrumental variables (IVs), sources of treatment randomization that are conditionally independent of the outcome, play an important role in causal inference with unobserved confounders. However, the existing IV-based counterfactual prediction methods need well-predefined IVs, while it is an art rather than science to find valid IVs in many real-world scenes. Moreover, the predefined hand-made IVs could be weak or erroneous by violating the conditions of valid IVs. These thorny facts hinder the application of the IV-based counterfactual prediction methods. In this paper, we propose a novel Automatic Instrumental Variable decomposition (AutoIV) algorithm to automatically generate representations serving the role of IVs from observed variables (IV candidates). Specifically, we let the learned IV representations satisfy the relevance condition with the treatment and exclusion condition with the outcome via mutual information maximization and minimization constraints, respectively. We also learn confounder representations by encouraging them to be relevant to both the treatment and the outcome. The IV and confounder representations compete for the information with their constraints in an adversarial game, which allows us to get valid IV representations for IV-based counterfactual prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates valid IV representations for accurate IV-based counterfactual prediction.

Panyanat Aonpong, Yutaro Iwamoto, Xian-Hua Han et al.

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is a serious disease and has a high recurrence rate after the surgery. Recently, many machine learning methods have been proposed for recurrence prediction. The methods using gene data have high prediction accuracy but require high cost. Although the radiomics signatures using only CT image are not expensive, its accuracy is relatively low. In this paper, we propose a genotype-guided radiomics method (GGR) for obtaining high prediction accuracy with low cost. We used a public radiogenomics dataset of NSCLC, which includes CT images and gene data. The proposed method is a two-step method, which consists of two models. The first model is a gene estimation model, which is used to estimate the gene expression from radiomics features and deep features extracted from computer tomography (CT) image. The second model is used to predict the recurrence using the estimated gene expression data. The proposed GGR method designed based on hybrid features which is combination of handcrafted-based and deep learning-based. The experiments demonstrated that the prediction accuracy can be improved significantly from 78.61% (existing radiomics method) and 79.14% (deep learning method) to 83.28% by the proposed GGR.

Huimin Huang, Ming Cai, Lanfen Lin et al.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly spread in 2020, emerging a mass of studies for lung infection segmentation from CT images. Though many methods have been proposed for this issue, it is a challenging task because of infections of various size appearing in different lobe zones. To tackle these issues, we propose a Graph-based Pyramid Global Context Reasoning (Graph-PGCR) module, which is capable of modeling long-range dependencies among disjoint infections as well as adapt size variation. We first incorporate graph convolution to exploit long-term contextual information from multiple lobe zones. Different from previous average pooling or maximum object probability, we propose a saliency-aware projection mechanism to pick up infection-related pixels as a set of graph nodes. After graph reasoning, the relation-aware features are reversed back to the original coordinate space for the down-stream tasks. We further construct multiple graphs with different sampling rates to handle the size variation problem. To this end, distinct multi-scale long-range contextual patterns can be captured. Our Graph-PGCR module is plug-and-play, which can be integrated into any architecture to improve its performance. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed method consistently boost the performance of state-of-the-art backbone architectures on both of public and our private COVID-19 datasets.

Yingying Xu, Ming Cai, Lanfen Lin et al.

In this paper, we propose a phase attention residual network (PA-ResSeg) to model multi-phase features for accurate liver tumor segmentation, in which a phase attention (PA) is newly proposed to additionally exploit the images of arterial (ART) phase to facilitate the segmentation of portal venous (PV) phase. The PA block consists of an intra-phase attention (Intra-PA) module and an inter-phase attention (Inter-PA) module to capture channel-wise self-dependencies and cross-phase interdependencies, respectively. Thus it enables the network to learn more representative multi-phase features by refining the PV features according to the channel dependencies and recalibrating the ART features based on the learned interdependencies between phases. We propose a PA-based multi-scale fusion (MSF) architecture to embed the PA blocks in the network at multiple levels along the encoding path to fuse multi-scale features from multi-phase images. Moreover, a 3D boundary-enhanced loss (BE-loss) is proposed for training to make the network more sensitive to boundaries. To evaluate the performance of our proposed PA-ResSeg, we conducted experiments on a multi-phase CT dataset of focal liver lesions (MPCT-FLLs). Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method by achieving a dice per case (DPC) of 0.77.87, a dice global (DG) of 0.8682, a volumetric overlap error (VOE) of 0.3328 and a relative volume difference (RVD) of 0.0443 on the MPCT-FLLs. Furthermore, to validate the effectiveness and robustness of PA-ResSeg, we conducted extra experiments on another multi-phase liver tumor dataset and obtained a DPC of 0.8290, a DG of 0.9132, a VOE of 0.2637 and a RVD of 0.0163. The proposed method shows its robustness and generalization capability in different datasets and different backbones.

Yuting Chen, Yanshi Wang, Yabo Ni et al.

Recommender systems (RSs) are essential for e-commerce platforms to help meet the enormous needs of users. How to capture user interests and make accurate recommendations for users in heterogeneous e-commerce scenarios is still a continuous research topic. However, most existing studies overlook the intrinsic association of the scenarios: the log data collected from platforms can be naturally divided into different scenarios (e.g., country, city, culture). We observed that the scenarios are heterogeneous because of the huge differences among them. Therefore, a unified model is difficult to effectively capture complex correlations (e.g., differences and similarities) between multiple scenarios thus seriously reducing the accuracy of recommendation results. In this paper, we target the problem of multi-scenario recommendation in e-commerce, and propose a novel recommendation model named Scenario-aware Mutual Learning (SAML) that leverages the differences and similarities between multiple scenarios. We first introduce scenario-aware feature representation, which transforms the embedding and attention modules to map the features into both global and scenario-specific subspace in parallel. Then we introduce an auxiliary network to model the shared knowledge across all scenarios, and use a multi-branch network to model differences among specific scenarios. Finally, we employ a novel mutual unit to adaptively learn the similarity between various scenarios and incorporate it into multi-branch network. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, empirical results show that SAML consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Yinhao Li, Yutaro Iwamoto, Lanfen Lin et al.

Deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) techniques have generally achieved excellent performance in the computer vision field. Recently, it has been proven that three-dimensional (3D) SR for medical volumetric data delivers better visual results than conventional two-dimensional (2D) processing. However, deepening and widening 3D networks increases training difficulty significantly due to the large number of parameters and small number of training samples. Thus, we propose a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) for SR of medical volumetric data called ParallelNet using parallel connections. We construct a parallel connection structure based on the group convolution and feature aggregation to build a 3D CNN that is as wide as possible with few parameters. As a result, the model thoroughly learns more feature maps with larger receptive fields. In addition, to further improve accuracy, we present an efficient version of ParallelNet (called VolumeNet), which reduces the number of parameters and deepens ParallelNet using a proposed lightweight building block module called the Queue module. Unlike most lightweight CNNs based on depthwise convolutions, the Queue module is primarily constructed using separable 2D cross-channel convolutions. As a result, the number of network parameters and computational complexity can be reduced significantly while maintaining accuracy due to full channel fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed VolumeNet significantly reduces the number of model parameters and achieves high precision results compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Titinunt Kitrungrotsakul, Iwamoto Yutaro, Lanfen Lin et al.

Deep learning techniques have successfully been employed in numerous computer vision tasks including image segmentation. The techniques have also been applied to medical image segmentation, one of the most critical tasks in computer-aided diagnosis. Compared with natural images, the medical image is a gray-scale image with low-contrast (even with some invisible parts). Because some organs have similar intensity and texture with neighboring organs, there is usually a need to refine automatic segmentation results. In this paper, we propose an interactive deep refinement framework to improve the traditional semantic segmentation networks such as U-Net and fully convolutional network. In the proposed framework, we added a refinement network to traditional segmentation network to refine the segmentation results.Experimental results with public dataset revealed that the proposed method could achieve higher accuracy than other state-of-the-art methods.